Incident -- Norman MacCaig

Guest poem submitted by Amulya Gopalakrishnan:

(Poem #699) Incident I look across the table and think (fiery with love) Ask me, go on, ask me to do something impossible, something freakishly useless, something unimaginable and inimitable Like making a finger break into blossom or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes or remembering tomorrow. I will you to ask it. But all you say is Will you give me a cigarette? And I smile and, returning to the marvelous world of possibility I give you one with a hand that trembles with a human trembling. -- Norman MacCaig

Find me a guy who thinks like that, the madness and the wry tenderness...
realizing the awful depth of his love, the contrast between that glorious
pitch of passion and our unmagical surroundings. Reminds me of Yeats in
Adam's Curse( yearning to love her in 'the old high way of love'). I love
the touches like 'marvellous world of possibility'... discovering the
romance of the real. What's absolutely wonderful about MacCaig is the way he
always, always brings out the underworld of dreaming, of the fantasy
billowing beneath the even surface of the everyday.

Amulya.